University of Calgary destroyed records related to May 9 police violence against protesters

University of Calgary campus security executives destroyed evidence implicating them in decision-making around the May 9 protest on campus, according to documents obtained by Drug Data Decoded. Legal investigations remain ongoing around police violence ordered that day against protesters by University administration and campus security.

In the wake of violence experienced by people protesting the University's refusal to disclose its involvement with Palestinian genocide profiteers, Drug Data Decoded submitted parallel freedom of information requests to Calgary Police Service and the University of Calgary. The requests sought correspondence between Campus Security and Calgary Police on the day of the protest, which launched as an encampment in a University quadrangle early in the morning on May 9, 2024.

Calgary Police and the University delayed responding to the request for several months. Following Information and Privacy Commissioner complaints, both public bodies were forced to provide responses.

The University responded that the requests produced "no responsive records," meaning the University was unable to find any emails or other correspondence between Calgary Police and Campus Security from May 9, 2024.

This was not the story given by Calgary Police, which released a series of May 9 emails between several members of Calgary Police, University of Calgary Director of Campus Security Rick Gysen and University of Calgary Senior Director of Emergency Services Bob Maber.

The emails scheduled a Microsoft Teams meeting at 11am on May 9, but in its response, Calgary Police fully withheld the apparent plan that took shape from this meeting. In a final email from Gysen to Calgary Police Detective Zain Kelly (Major Events and Emergency Management division) at 12:59pm on May 9, Gysen simply asks Kelly, "Zain, would this work?" The page that follows is entirely redacted.

Drug Data Decoded approached the University FOIP office, Mr. Gysen and Mr. Maber by email on February 11, again requesting the University's versions of these documents. Seven minutes later, the FOIP office replied that "the FOIP Act does not require public bodies to create records, nor retain records that the public body determines do not require long term preservation. The university is declining to perform an additional search." (Emphasis added.)

This reveals that despite ongoing Calgary Police investigations, campus security executives destroyed records implicating themselves in decision-making around the response. Furthermore, the initial FOIP request to the University was on September 25, 2024, while the University's heavily criticized exculpatory third-party review of its protest response was launched on May 30, 2024.

Therefore, there was no time at which these email records between Calgary Police and Campus Security were irrelevant to ongoing proceedings or "transient" in any way meriting destruction. Alberta's FOIP Act holds that "a person must not willfully alter, falsify or conceal any record, or direct another person to do so, with the intent to evade a request for access to the record," contravention of which is an offence with a maximum punishment up to $10,000. The Act also states that prosecution must be underway within 2 years of the alleged offence.

It is unclear when these records were destroyed, whether the records were identified by the executives as having legal significance, or whether their destruction was coordinated between Mr. Gysen, Mr. Maber and University Legal Services at the time. Gysen, Maber and the University FOIP office were asked to clarify these points on March 4 but did not respond.

In late 2023, The Globe & Mail reported that "public institutions across the country are routinely breaking [freedom of information] laws by overusing redactions, violating statutory time limits and claiming 'no records' exist when they do."

Ominously, report authors Tom Cardoso and Robyn Doolittle noted that nobody has been charged in Canada under freedom of information law — not for lack of trying, but rather because of weak enforcement structures. They noted the "natural tension in asking a government to investigate itself," and emphasized the difficulty in proving that someone "intended to circumvent the law – an extremely high bar."

Drug Data Decoded has previously reported on the difficulty of obtaining records concerning the May 9 protest from Calgary Police, the Alberta government and the University of Calgary. The author of this story was among the protesters beaten and arrested for trespass on May 9, but the charges were quietly withdrawn by the Crown Prosecutor on February 13. Active trespass charges remain against three individuals, each of whom was assaulted by Calgary Police on May 9. They include a mother of two University of Calgary students.

Journalist Adeline Gladu covered the challenges of accessing information on the protest response from public bodies. Of 13 freedom of information requests submitted by this author to the University, Calgary Police or provincial government on the encampment protest between May and October 2024, fewer than half have received responses — and all but one of these have been heavily redacted or wrongfully withheld.

In Gladu's reporting, University of Calgary law professor Jennifer Koshan called into question "the university’s reasons for believing that it needed to invoke a trespass notice and call in the police to enforce it."

This question was addressed by journalist Jeremy Appel in his analysis of 800 pages of documents obtained through a freedom of information request detailing preparations by the University of Calgary for a potential encampment protest from late April to early May 2024. From these documents, Appel revealed an April 30 email from a pro-Israel group to University President Ed McCauley, lobbying the University to “take all necessary measures to prevent an encampment at UCalgary.”

McCauley responded personally to the email – an act that did not occur elsewhere in the 800 pages of released documents. In his reply, written one day after the encampment was dismantled, McCauley assured the recipient that “hate crimes and violence will not be tolerated."

As Appel noted, McCauley failed to reconcile this statement with the violence he inflicted on protestors, including his own students, just hours before.

On May 30, 2024, the University Office of Legal Services was served a litigation hold to preserve all video evidence concerning the assault by Calgary Police on protesters. While this request did not extend to other types of records, it is nonetheless dubious for University executives to have deleted records of an incident still under legal investigation.

On March 4, Appel followed up his reporting with a scoop on the cover-up of serious injuries inflicted by Calgary Police against protesters. The cover-up appears to have been coordinated between the office of the Alberta Premier, the Ministry of Public Safety, which oversees the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, and Calgary Police Chief Mark Neufeld.

In a telephone exchange, the Premier's then-Chief of Staff, Marshall Smith, told Neufeld that “ASIRT won’t investigate.” Instead, ASIRT would conduct a preliminary probe to determine if there was “serious injury.” Those are precisely the events that followed: protesters (including this author, who suffered a concussions at the protest) were told in August 2024 that their injuries were not serious, and that the investigation would be sent back to Calgary Police Service Professional Standards.

However, efforts to obtain the July 4 report provided to ASIRT by Calgary Police concerning this author's injuries have failed, with both public bodies refusing to disclose the critical documents. On March 5, eight months after the initial complaint, Calgary Police Professional Standards Division informed the author that its investigation "needed more information before proceeding." No further details were given.

No resignations or firings have yet been associated with the violence ordered by the University of Calgary Office of the President and carried out by Calgary Police Service.

Combined with Appel's findings, the destruction of records that hold legal evidence in ongoing investigations helps illustrate a pattern of cover-ups ongoing within all public bodies associated with the violence at the University of Calgary on May 9: the Alberta government, Calgary Police Service and the University itself.

If you have additional information on this story, please get in touch at info@drugdatadecoded.ca, where media can also request FOI documents related to this story.

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Drug Data Decoded provides analysis using news sources, publicly available data sets and freedom of information submissions, from which the author draws reasonable opinions. The author is not a journalist.